Social Workers in Short Supply in South Africa

Social Workers in Short Supply in South Africa

Article excerpt

In the Johannesburg suburb of Roodepoort, just north of the
sprawling township of Soweto, Loftie Eton manages a small child-
welfare agency that has steadily become the front lines in South
Africa's troubled war on AIDS.

Here, children orphaned by AIDS find homes. Here, foster parents
maneuver through the intricate process of getting legal custody of
children and access to the trickle of government grants to help them
keep these children clothed, fed, and in school.

The caseload at the Roodepoort Child Welfare Society has grown in
the past 10 years from perhaps 60 to 80 children per year to well
over 1,000. Social workers each have between 110 and as many as 400
cases to sort through, virtually all of them children who have lost
parents to AIDS. The vast majority will be handed over to aunts or
grandmothers, but some children simply have no relatives willing or
able to take them in.

"We told the government we weren't taking any more cases," says
Ms. Eton, a tall, red-haired, friendly Afrikaans-speaking woman who
has worked here for a decade. She told the official for the
Department of Social Services that "no social worker can handle 250
cases." "They told me, 'If you want to keep taking government
funding, then you have to keep taking cases.'"

There are hundreds of agencies like Eton's around the country,
technically private charities, but essentially providing a
government service. All tell the same story: AIDS has left them
overworked, understaffed, and unable to provide the attention their
clients deserve.

A report commissioned by South Africa's Ministry of Social
Development in 2005 found that the country has half the number of
social workers needed to meet the minimum services to children. The
shortage is particularly acute in Gauteng Province, which includes
Johannesburg and the capital city of Tshwane (formerly known as
Pretoria), with an average of 5,395 children per social worker,
according to the study. And while the government has won praise for
its commitment to children's protection programs in its current five-
year plan, there are neither the resources nor the personnel in the
country to implement these plans. …